Temblor Encore : Chronicler of 1906 S.F. Quake Turns Attention to ’89 Disaster Without Missing a Beat

SAN FRANCISCO —  As this city’s official archivist, Gladys Hansen feels right at home in a musty room on the third floor of the Main Library. It is here where she has spent more than two decades of her working life on the study of a few moments in time: the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco.

Her findings appear in the book “Denial of Disaster,” which arrives in bookstores Thursday. The book contains about 300 never-before-seen historical photos and hundreds of stories left by survivors documenting the true extent of that earthquake.

But her work does not end there. Now, as a result of the 7.1-magnitude temblor that struck Northern California on Oct. 17, the 64-year old researcher has begun to gather the material for a possible sequel. Only this time, she’s using firsthand accounts.

“After the quake, I realized this would be a great opportunity to gather materials from people to write their own story while it’s still fresh in their memory, not 50 years later,” she said.

On Oct. 17, She was engaged in her usual routine of meticulously researching books and records--her full-time job with the city--when “the building started making this awful sound, like rocks grinding,” she said. “Then I looked up among the bookshelves and noticed this rising cloud of dust. I knew immediately what was going on.”

Two days after the jolt, Hansen and her staff of five assistants passed out flyers on the streets to citizens, asking them to record their personal stories and to mail them to the library. The main library building in Civic Center was closed to the public after the quake but remains open to Hansen and the rest of the staff.

So far, Hansen’s group has solicited earthquake stories from nearly 400 men and women, and just as many from children from Bay Area schools, who sent in letters, poems, photographs and drawings.

“I’ve been really taken aback on how well-written and exciting these stories are,” Hansen said. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the public’s reception to share their stories.”

The letters, particularly from children in kindergarten through high school, keep pouring in.

Among them is 6-year-old Albert Hinkle’s recollections. He was staying at the Noriega Children’s Center in the city’s Sunset District when the quake hit. “I was under the table,” he wrote. “I didn’t panic. The closet was moving. And blocks fell down. The lights went off. The clock was dead.”

One file contains crayon drawings by students at Grattan Elementary School. One of the pictures, titled “Electricity goes out” by first-grader Andy Nguyen, portrays two characters holding candles. First-grader Christopher Alberto drew “The phones are dead,” a page marked by crisscrossing black lines.

“The kids really have an imagination,” said Frank Quinn, Hansen’s 74-year-old research assistant and a retired registrar of voters. “Their accounts are so vivid and innocent. We’re really smitten by these because the children are the future generation.”

The hundreds of letters are neatly filed alphabetically by the writer’s last name in cardboard boxes and each file is labeled. The labels range from “Candlestick Park--World Series” to “Paraplegic’s account of earthquake day.” The storytellers represent an assortment of ages, professions, backgrounds and locations.

“You had two waves going on during the earthquake,” Hansen said. “One was the wave of tourists fleeing the city, and the other were Bay Area residents either on out-of-town business trips or on vacation elsewhere, who came back to the city just as fast as the tourists left it.

“We’re trying to reach people who were among the tourists who fled as soon as possible after the quake hit. Obviously, their reaction to the quake is totally different from native San Franciscans.” Hansen has already heard from some visitors.

Loretta Anderson of Minneapolis was attending a business convention with her husband at the downtown Hilton on Oct. 17 when the building rocked back and forth. She wrote, “I’ll take good old Minnesota blizzards and yes, tornadoes, anytime. At least you have a warning. No one can predict an earthquake.”

Steve Cotton and his wife, Carol, cut a vacation in London short after they were telephoned at 6 a.m. (London time) on Wednesday, Oct. 18, by a friend who told them that “there’s been a terrible earthquake, the Bay Bridge collapsed and the Marina’s on fire.” The Cottons left London on Sunday morning and headed home.

“The first surprise was the eeriness of the city,” Steve Cotton wrote of their arrival back. “Our cab was the only car on the road.”

For Koula Meletis of San Francisco, returning home from her job in the downtown financial district required hiking because public transportation had stopped running. She walked exactly 7.1 miles to get home, she noted, which is the same number as the magnitude of the quake.

“It looked like a war zone the whole way home,” Meletis wrote. “There was debris and broken glass everywhere. I walked through the darkness and relied on the headlights of cars to guide me home. Not bad for a 58-year-old woman.”

In 1965, Hansen established the San Francisco Earthquake Research Project as a private, volunteer effort to piece together the full story of the 1906 earthquake. Among the volunteers was her son, Richard, a search-and-rescue instructor and photographer.

“Denial of Disaster” is the result of 24 years of work by Hansen. It was scheduled to have rolled off the publisher’s presses on Oct. 19. The press run was delayed for days by Cameron Publishing of San Francisco to allow time to insert one page devoted to the 1989 earthquake.

The book has since raised controversy with its claims that the 1906 earthquake deaths were purposely minimized by city officials who wanted the world to know that the quake was not so bad, that the resulting fires caused most of the havoc. Businesses similarly downplayed earthquake devastation and blamed their losses on fires so they could collect on their fire insurance, Hansen’s book contends. The book also says that photographs of the destruction were retouched.

“There’s no way this one could be denied,” Hansen said of the impact of the recent quake. “It’s all right here,” she said in an interview, holding up her files. “Hopefully, this last one gave us the opportunity to see what went wrong and allowed us the chance to rehearse our response to the next great earthquake.”

Comparing the letters she has received, Hansen said people’s mood changed as time went by.

“In the beginning, we received letters from folks who said, ‘That’s it, I’m leaving,’ ” Hansen said. “But now, no one is saying that. More and more say this is where their heart is and they’re staying.”

Hansen said it is too soon to tell if the materials she is gathering will lead to another book. Her priority is to keep collecting resources and eventually she wants to preserve the letters on microfiche. She looks forward to next month when the archive room and the rest of the library is scheduled to reopen to the public.

“People will always want to know what happened,” she said. “They want details. The stories they’ve recorded here are what make the event human for future generations.”

Junior high school student Eugenia Crowley put her thoughts down in a poem she submitted for her creative writing class, then mailed to Hansen:

“Children will listen when the old folks say,

‘I was there when it happened, I remember it well.

When the earth shook on that fateful day

And the bridge was damaged that spans the Bay.”’

This will help, says Gladys Hansen, to keep the record straight.